OMV Board member Werner Auli to leave the company’s Executive Board

• After nearly 25 years of active service at OMV, Werner Auli will be stepping down as a member of the Executive Board due to health reasons at the end of 2011
• The Gas and Power business segment has become a successful and integrated part of the group in recent years

Werner Auli (51), member of the OMV Executive Board responsible for Gas and Power, will be stepping down on health reasons at the end of this year. “I have thought long and hard about this step. Taking this decision has not been easy for me. The business segment I run, Gas and Power, plays a major part in my life, but so does my health and so ultimately and also in the interest of my family I give priority to my well-being. I will therefore arrange for an orderly handover of the segment I run at the end of this year,” he said.

A long-serving member of the Executive Board, Werner Auli successfully launched many of the Group’s gas projects. Austria has gradually become one of the largest natural gas hubs in Europe, with a major position in trading, transportation and storage. This strong position ensures security of energy supply for Austria. Setting up the Central European Gas Hub, a natural gas trading platform, further reinforced Austria’s position as an international gas trading centre and increased liquidity.

The company has also successfully moved further along the gas value chain into power generation. The first 860 MW combined-cycle gas plant, in Brazi, Romania, is going into operation this year and another will follow in 2012 in Turkey. Werner Auli was further responsible for setting up a new and strategically essential electricity trading division that is now coming to fruition and processing the company’s first trades.

He was also the driving force behind the Nabucco gas pipeline project. “Nabucco is a truly complex project calling for endurance and great persistence in the numerous and intensive negotiations, but it is also a major logistics project. Not just for us as a company, but for Europe,” he says. As Chairman of the Nabucco steering committee, Werner Auli will continue to work actively on this important pipeline project and bring it to the stage where a final decision is taken on investment and construction.

His success can also be measured in figures. The EBIT of the business segment Gas and Power has more than tripled to EUR 277 mn during his tenure.

Markus Beyrer, Chief Executive Officer of OIAG stated: “ Werner Auli has had a decisive impact on the business segment Gas and Power. Thanks to him, it has become a strategically important business area for OMV with great growth potential. He has laid the foundations for further profitable growth. In the name of the Supervisory Board, I want to thank him explicitly for his achievements.”

Background information:
OMV Group
OMV Group is one of the largest listed industrial companies in Austria, with consolidated revenues of EUR 23.32 billion and 31,398 employees in 2010. In Exploration & Production, OMV has activities in two core countries, Romania and Austria, and a balanced international portfolio. Proven oil and natural gas reserves at end-2010 were roughly 1.15 billion boe, daily production in H1 2011 was around 290,000 boe. In Refining & Marketing OMV has annual refinery capacity of 22.3 million tonnes and at the end of June 2011 owned over 4,700 petrol stations in 13 countries, including Turkey. In Gas & Power, OMV sold around 18 billion cubic metres of gas in 2010. The group has a 2,000 kilometre gas pipeline network in Austria, which in 2010 had a marketed capacity of approximately 89 billion cubic metres. The Central European Gas Hub has annual trading volumes of 34 billion cubic metres, making it one of the largest in continental Europe. A 97% stake in Petrol Ofisi, Turkey’s leading petrol station company, has further reinforced OMV’s position.

Sustainability
OMV has signed up to the UN Global Compact and actively promotes the values it has committed to in its Code of Conduct. It accepts responsibility for people and the environment, especially in regions of social and economic sensitivity. OMV constantly acts to take responsible account of the business, ecological and social dimension in its business activities. The company reports regularly on such activities in a sustainability report that it is published together with the annual report and follows the internationally recognised Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards.

For further queries please contact:
OMV
Media Relations:  Michaela Huber, Tel.: +43 1 40440 21661
 E-mail: michaela.huber@omv.com

Sven Pusswald, Tel.: +43 1 40440 21246  
E-mail: sven.pusswald@omv.com